The country has a fiendishly complicated electoral system that is a combination of population-based proportional representation and party-based national lists, says Aditi Phadnis
'Wherever in the world there is political instability, those countries are beset with severe crises today. But India is in a much better position than the rest of the world due to the decisions taken by my government in the national interest,' President Droupadi Murmu said in her address to both Houses of Parliament.
'The central and Assamese governments want to get 35 lakh to 40 lakh Bangladeshis (Hindus) to come to Assam and make the Assamese people a minority.' 'They want to make Assam a Bengali state.' 'Bengalis by nature are BJP supporters whereas Assamese people don't support the BJP.'
"For any reason, if one is not able to vote, it should pain one," he said.
'Mere 'literacy' is not the same thing as 'education', which involves conceding that others have rights, and that one of those prerogatives is a woman's right to dignity. In 2012, the Kerala police registered 1,474 cases of rape, of which 455 victims were children,' says T V R Shenoy.
After the Ladakh fiasco where Xi Jinping did not expect the Indian Army to resist his land-grabbing tactics, he has to save face before his colleagues in the Communist party.' To bring the threat of a mega-dam to the northern Indian border is a clever move, observes Claude Arpi.
'As soon as the BJP feels they are going to lose power, they will publish the caste census data of 2011 and conduct the caste census of 2021.'
As President Biden moves ahead with a new 'strategic concept' for China and Russia, the going is bound to get rough for the US and its G7 partners, notes Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Saturday said that she would not allow the soil of her country to be used for any kind of extremism and hoped that India would also reciprocate on the matter.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Professor of Economics at Harvard University Raj Chetty have been named by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as '2020 Great Immigrants' honourees, the Corporation said in a statement on Wednesday.
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's address to the nation on the eve of 72nd Republic Day.
Had it not been for the intellectual dominance and political legitimacy of the Leftist philosophy since 1970, would EPW have become what it did? After all, there were other more established journals around then, says T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan.
Congress has backed Election Commission's views on restricting publication and dissemination of opinion polls during elections, saying the random surveys are "erroneous", "lack credibility" and could be "manipulated" by vested interests.
While we complain about comfort in coaches, rarely do we think about the comfort of engine drivers.
The NHRC issued notice to the Union ministries of home and human resource development seeking a report over the reported ill-treatment of Kashmiri people in the aftermath of the attack.
'In what must go down as one of the most nonchalant remarks by the head of any hospital, J J Hospital Dean Dr Ranjit Mankeshwar said: 'We do not know where the staff was, but he did not suffer serious wounds'.'
At least a dozen officers from Gujarat are handling key assignments in various important central positions
Khan, who is believed to have the backing of the powerful military, has vowed to make a 'Naya Pakistan' which would be an Islamic welfare state.
'Information highways are getting stronger and being strengthened.' 'Occasionally, accidents could occur. But do you stop constructing highways because two motor cars collide?'
Terming opinion polls as a "racket", "farce" and "manipulated" exercise, Congress on Monday made a strong pitch to ban them.
Javadekar was at the event, where presence of his ministerial colleague V K Singh last year had drawn flak from the media, for around 20 minutes, and extended his 'best wishes' to the Pakistani people on the sidelines.
India witnessed religiously motivated killings, arrests, riots and coerced religious conversions and the police in some cases failed to respond effectively to communal violence, according to the US State Department report on International Religious Freedom.
Mahinda Rajapaksa completed 50 years of parliamentary politics in July this year. He was elected as a Member of Parliament at the young age of 24 in 1970. He has since been elected president twice and has been appointed prime minister thrice.
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It's perverse to rationalise 'controlled' killings or torture -- without going down a slippery moral slope. Once the state stoops to torture, it's liable to sink into tyranny, says Praful Bidwai.
India and five Central Asian countries on Thursday decided to establish a joint working group on Afghanistan at the senior officials' level, ministry of external affairs secretary (West) Reenat Sandhu said.
'Unlike Trump, who has an isolationist approach, Bolton would like to roam around the world, trampling upon any sign of dissent,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.
Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Saturday said Hindu migrants from Bangladesh must be accommodated in the country and detention camps would be done away with once his party comes to power.
'Information trickled in that these phone numbers were switched off when there were blasts in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and at the time of the Delhi blasts.
'Your confidence is shaken when the government does what it does these days, but then it is the same confidence that gives you the courage to stand up to the government's high-handedness.' 'There will always be people who will not fear jails or the physical and mental torture that visit citizens protesting against the government's draconian policies and laws.' 'There will always be Indians who will not be afraid to face the consequences of fighting for their Constitutional rights.'
In the 2009 election, P Chindambaram the Sivaganga seat by a narrow margin. Then the Congress was in alliance with the ruling DMK. This time his son Karti is battling the seat with the alliance. India abstention at the UNHRC on an anti-Lanka resolution will further fuel Tamil anger against the Congress party. This leaves the finance minster sulking and his son facing an uphill political debut, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
There are unprecedented political implications of identification based on 'biological attributes of an individual', such as employed by Aadhaar, warns Gopal Krishna.
The letter, to maintain the current policy of denying Narendra Modi a visa to the United States, was released just as the BJP president arrived in Washington DC for a round of meetings with US lawmakers. Aziz Haniffa reports
Does Mrs Donald Trump realise that her immediate predecessor, Michelle Obama, is not the only hard act to follow, wonders Kanika Datta.
One hopes the higher courts take the extraordinary steps needed to secure justice for the victims. The Gujarat carnage demands nothing less because of its unique nature and sponsorship by the State, argues Praful Bidwai.
'The answer is no, the entire country's is.' 'So why such obsession with Delhi?' 'But the most powerful people in India live here: The prime minister, civil servants, Supreme Court judges, MPs, diplomats, dadas of the media...' 'If they can't deal with their own problem, what chance does the rest of the country have, with its foul air, dying rivers, frothing lakes, and crumbling mountains?' says Shekhar Gupta.
'The forces of good are on the run.' 'But dark times also challenge people to fight.' 'I believe Indians will rise against these dark times.'
'If Rao had, in fact, given a word to President Clinton in 1994 that India would not test, he would not have encouraged Vajpayee to test. The note, said to have been handed over to Vajpayee by Rao with the words, 'Now is the time to accomplish my unfinished task' may not have been a reference to nuclear tests at all,' says T P Sreenivasan.
US congressional leaders on trade and finance wrote to the US International Trade Commission calling for a second investigation into India's 'unfair' trade practices, detailing any changes under Modi.
The child, whose parents work as labourers in a factory, was beaten and brutalised with a sharp object. She is critical and on oxygen support, said a senior doctor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences where she is admitted.
'Growth is predicated on the misery of large sections of people.' 'Maybe Hindutva will be used to suppress any such unrest.'
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